The XKeyscore rules reveal that the NSA tracks all connections to a server that hosts part of an anonymous email service at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It also records details about visits to a popular internet journal for Linux operating system users called "the Linux Journal - the Original Magazine of the Linux Community", and calls it an "extremist forum".

More at the link. A lot more.

You dirty terrorists!

40hz, shades, and many others... I fully expect you to turn yourselves in for your crimes!

This post should totally be a poll for how many people pissed themselves laughing!

Called it. Called it for a very LONG time- that Tor was a NSA honeypot and likely had one or more compromised nodes that allowed the NSA to snoop on its traffic.

Of course they wouldn't like Linux users either. How dare you cause billions of dollars in economic damage by not paying the Microsoft tax and instead using free software that doesn't make a profit for our all-knowing corporate overlords. Linux also is so highly customizable that it is difficult to hack into- a competent admin will customize the configurations of just about everything in order to ward off package-deal exploits and newbie hackers that rely on downloaded scripts.

40hz, shades, and many others... I fully expect you to turn yourselves in for your crimes!

We won't need to. With the whole nation effectively becoming an electronic gulag, why bother with the inefficiencies of holding trials or locking individuals up if they're effectively already in a prison?

To people who are truly and wilfully ignorant, anything not readily understood is soon seen (and tagged) as a threat.

And since what isn't understood amounts to a refusal to deal with reality, it only makes sense to imprison everyone and forbid almost everything.

A new story published on the German site Tagesschau and followed up by BoingBoing and DasErste.de has uncovered some shocking details about who the NSA targets for surveillance including visitors to Linux Journal itself.

While it has been revealed before that the NSA captures just about all Internet traffic for a short time, the Tagesschau story provides new details about how the NSA's XKEYSCORE program decides which traffic to keep indefinitely. XKEYSCORE uses specific selectors to flag traffic, and the article reveals that Web searches for Tor and Tails--software I've covered here in Linux Journal that helps to protect a user's anonymity and privacy on the Internet--are among the selectors that will flag you as "extremist" and targeted for further surveillance. If you just consider how many Linux Journal readers have read our Tor and Tails coverage in the magazine, that alone would flag quite a few innocent people as extremist.

While that is troubling in itself, even more troubling to readers on this site is that linuxjournal.com has been flagged as a selector! DasErste.de has published the relevant XKEYSCORE source code, and if you look closely at the rule definitions, you will see linuxjournal.com/content/linux* listed alongside Tails and Tor. According to an article on DasErste.de, the NSA considers Linux Journal an "extremist forum". This means that merely looking for any Linux content on Linux Journal, not just content about anonymizing software or encryption, is considered suspicious and means your Internet traffic may be stored indefinitely.

One of the biggest questions these new revelations raise is why. Up until this point, I would imagine most Linux Journal readers had considered the NSA revelations as troubling but figured the NSA would never be interested in them personally. Now we know that just visiting this site makes you a target. While we may never know for sure what it is about Linux Journal in particular, the Boing Boing article speculates that it might be to separate out people on the Internet who know how to be private from those who don't so it can capture communications from everyone with privacy know-how. If that's true, it seems to go much further to target anyone with Linux know-how.

It's bad news to all of us who use and read about Linux on a daily basis, but fortunately we aren't completely helpless. Earlier in the year I started a series on security, privacy and anonymity in my Hack and / column that included articles on how to use the Tor browser bundle and Tails. With either piece of software in place, you can browse Linux Journal (and the rest of the Internet) in private.

Since the news broke yesterday that we are an extremist publication according to the NSA, we at Linux Journal have thought a lot about what that might mean to our readers.

I am one of our readers, and I know many of our readers personally. That said, I can certainly describe many of us as "extreme" in a variety of ways. We're extremely passionate about our hobbies and professions, extremely excited by innovative technology, and extremely supportive of the open source software community. So maybe we are extremists.

So please join us in pronouncing that we support extremist causes like open source, online freedom, and the dissemination of helpful technical knowledge by adding one of these lovely graphics to your picture. And as always, thanks for your support. Available in red, black, or white.

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I just love this: "we support extremist causes like open source, online freedom, and the dissemination of helpful technical knowledge."

What would be really cool is for massive numbers of web sites to include an iframe of the Linux Journal (and others) to spam the NSA and create massively larger data storage requirements for them - just drown them in data!

What would be really cool is for massive numbers of web sites to include an iframe of the Linux Journal (and others) to spam the NSA and create massively larger data storage requirements for them - just drown them in data!

What would be really cool is for massive numbers of web sites to include an iframe of the Linux Journal (and others) to spam the NSA and create massively larger data storage requirements for them - just drown them in data!

Too easy to filter. I doubt it would slow them down at all.

And if you ever did drown them with data, they'd just get another appropriation and build a bigger data center.

This is not the sort of problem where you can efficiently fight technology with more technology.

What's needed is a change in the infrastructure and the people that are behind it. Because as long as things like Prism and the NSA and FISA exist, there will be ongoing abuses of civil liberties. A complete disregard for legal process is intrinsic to the attitude and mindset that created such things in the first place.

What would be really cool is for massive numbers of web sites to include an iframe of the Linux Journal (and others) to spam the NSA and create massively larger data storage requirements for them - just drown them in data!

What would be really cool is for massive numbers of web sites to include an iframe of the Linux Journal (and others) to spam the NSA and create massively larger data storage requirements for them - just drown them in data!

Too easy to filter. I doubt it would slow them down at all.

And if you ever did drown them with data, they'd just get another appropriation and build a bigger data center.

This is not the sort of problem where you can efficiently fight technology with more technology.

What's needed is a change in the infrastructure and the people that are behind it. Because as long as things like Prism and the NSA and FISA exist, there will be ongoing abuses of civil liberties. A complete disregard for legal process is intrinsic to the attitude and mindset that created such things in the first place.

It's a people problem. It's always a people problem. There's nothing "wrong" with the technology. The infrastructure is just a horrible misapplication of the technology.

I'm sure you saw the quotation marks. Let me rephrase it: If you're an OSX or Windows user, you shouldn't try to talk about how computers should work on those forums. A friend of mine switched from Windows to Linux, wouldn't ever touch a terminal but repeatedly makes low-quality "Windoze" jokes since then. Linux users, the ones with the only true plan.

On a side note why Linux sucks: Have you seen the latest presentation by Lennart "break ALL the systems!" Poettering? Linux as the "all-purpose OS" with every single thing tightly bound into one main system process. So sad.

Is it then that Linux sucks? Or that some people's grand visions (in their own minds at least) are rubbing you the wrong way?

Windows has it uses, Linuxes has it uses and BSD has its uses. Just use the better tool tool for the job. I specifically did not say best tool, because that usually feeds the trolls. After all, your opinion is not mine and therefore not necessarily better or worse.

In my experience, it is always better to drink the alcoholic beverage of your choice together and discuss. If something stuck after trying to drown it with alcohol, it might be worth your time to investigate further. Granted, that could be just me